If you teleport an object, is the object you receive the same as the one you sent?

Question

Teleportation seems to involve breaking up an object (for example Captain Kirk) and re-assembling him elsewhere. If you do that, is the reassembled Captain Kirk the same and original person, or is it a very good copy?

Answer 1

see right now we are just able to teleport some of elementary particles and this is our limit we can't teleport even molecules or other particles...and as far as you concerned yes if teleportation will do in the proper way we will get it the same copy..

hope you understand it....

Answer 2

yep ... u kn teleport thru blck holes... bt the object will be vaporised bcuz its in space... uve got to put it in space suit

Answer 3

If the teleporting goes as planned then the object received should be an exact copy of the one that was sent.

Answer 4

Is there a reason behind this question or are you just curious? ^^

Answer 5

In the concept of teleportation as we now pretend to understand it is that if the particles that make up that person are converted into energy transferred and reassembled into matter.

It is as if you put an electron into a wire, the same electron does not come out the other end. It is another from the pool of electrons in the wire.

If the soul resides within the particles, then this is only a copy of the original Captain Kirk  that would probably act like a copy.

If the body is only a receiver for the soul then the real Captain Kirk's soul should find the copy just as suitable as the original.  Thus, this copy IS Captain Kirk.

Answer 6

Well, given that teleportation is not real any answers you're going to get are purely speculative.

There seems to be two possible methods...matter is broken down, transported, and then reassembled in another location...or...matter is analyzed, data is transmitted, and it is then reassembled in another location.

I would guess that in the first scenario it would be the "same" object provided the reconstruction is exact.  It seems like in the second scenario it would be a copy.

In either case teleporting humans, ie Captain Kirk, would be interesting because it is uncertain as to how ones memory and/or soul would be effected.

Answer 7

If it is to work the teleported object has to be an exact duplicate, right down to the last electron.

Answer 8

No. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle excludes this for occurring.

The formation of matter transfer used in star trek is most likly impossible. It might be able to displace a body in space time without traveling through the space between.

Answer 9

Sorry, 'transporters' only work on Star Trek.  Bear in mind Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved the conversion of just about a golf-ball sized lump of matter into energy, and you see what diluting a whole Human would do to your equipment!

   I did read of a device which at great expense could effectively transport a sub-atomic particle from chamber A to chamber B, but as to wether it was the "same" particle...  I think that is open to debate!

Answer 10

Teleportation, as you describe it does not currently exist.  To some extent, the answer to your question is: ‘teleportation is what you define it to be’.  So if you define teleportation as copy of the old you being created in the new location, then a copy is sufficient.  If you define teleporting a copy as not teleportation, then a copy would not be sufficient.  Since teleportation does not really exist, it is, to some extent, free for interpretation.

What does is exist, currently, is quantum teleportation.  Some of the previous answers have mistakenly claimed that sub-atomic particles have been teleported.  Those people are wrong, and they have probably misunderstood the experiments that have been done in quantum teleportation.

In quantum teleportation (QT for short), three identical systems (or something analogous) are used.  Each system can be in a ‘quantum state’.  You can also be in a state, say the state of being happy, or the state of being sad.  Your car can be in a state of being functional or a state of being broken down.  You house can be in a state of being not hit by a meteor or a state of being hit by a meteor.  In the QT experiments, the objects are either atoms which can be in the state of being spin up or the state of being spin down, or the object can be a photon which can have one of the polarization states.  This state is what actually get teleported.  Not the object, but the state.  

The first of three identical systems will have the state you want to teleport.  The other two identical objects will have a fancy state called an entangled state (you can look up what this means on your own, but it is pretty deep into quantum mechanics and not a simple thing to explain here).  Then, by interacting the first object (the one with the target state) with the second object, and performing a few measurements on those two objects, while performing a few interactions with the third object, the state of the third object will suddenly become identical to the state of the first object (the state of the first object will become something random at the same time).  This means the state was teleported from the first object to the third object.

This may sound like it’s not really teleportation, because all you are doing is transferring the state from one object to another object.  But quantum mechanics will tell us that two object that have the identical state are indistinguishable.  This means that having transferred the state from one object to another object, for all intents and purposes, is identical to having physically moved the first object to the location of the other object.  In that sense, this is exactly teleportation.  And the teleported state is not a copy, but the actual state (quantum mechanics, in the “No Cloning Theorem” tells us that it is impossible to copy an arbitrary state).

So QT does exist, but it has not been used to teleport matter (no matter how big).  It has only been used to teleport quantum states of atoms and photons, which requires having identical atoms or photons to teleport the state between.  In theory, a human is a very complicated quantum system that could also be teleported.  But it is so much more complicated than an atom, that it would be very very hard to scale this process from atoms to humans (and is not something any of us will see in our lifetime).  That being said, I don’t think anyone really needs their quantum state to be teleported, as that is way too accurate of a teleportation.  You could be much sloppier with the teleportation and still come out with a human that is identical for our intents and purposes.  If you were willing to be sloppier and not exactly preserve the quantum state of a human, you could get away with making a copy and the technology is much more feasible (but still a long long way off).

So, to answer your question directly, in QT, the thing being teleported is the actual object and not a copy.  But if you made a device that could copy a human and rebuild it somewhere else, that would not be quantum teleportation, but I would still call it teleportation.